Great way to get more cars on the road, good job big brains!

My lad's bike was nicked from a train station a few months back. He'd left it there, locked in the rack while he was at work. You know, pretty standard stuff.

BTP told him they weren't going to investigate it because it was left for longer than 2 hours.

I'm still fucking angry about that.

edit: Oh, just read the article, and yeah, that's exactly what it's about. Cunts.

2 hours. Completely defies the point of having the racks. I can understand bikes left for days considered an issue. But not covering actual daily commute times for working people. The main purpose of public transport,

MPs need to come down on this. It's utterly disgusting that BTP has jurisdiction and has decided independently what they consider to be their fucking job.

Honestly the only thing commuters can do is write to MPs.

I wonder if they'd adopt the same two hour window if I smashed into a ticket machine and stole all the cash.

Too busy harassing people they think may be fare dodging to protect private companies bottom lines whilst said companies continue to raise prices and drastically decrease the quality and reliability of the service.

ACAB. Fuck the police and fuck the useless fucking train companies.

"The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV... the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains, investigating crimes which cause the most harm."

You mean like having them stand there in the station with dogs to stop people for suspected drug possession? Y'know, "harmful" crimes. I know that's not the only thing they ever do but they certainly do waste so much of their time with pointless stuff like that, at least in certain cities

Exactly what we need aswell, people being more discouraged to use bikes and forcing people even more into getting cars and making our already overcrowded and dangerous roads even more overcrowded and dangerous. Wonder if there's an easy solution to stop people taking bikes from the bike lock up areas? Like hmm maybe having them all be properly secure and the station employing one or two people to keep watch? Nah silly idea...

“The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV… the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains, investigating crimes which cause the most harm.”

Interesting. Then they'll stop investigating other vehicle theft, too, right?

Also, if you are going to "decriminalize" crimes like that, then at least "decriminalize" actions taken by people to prevent or recover their stolen property.

In the Netherlands we. have. bike. theft.

Quién inlived there I had my bike stolen at least once a year, I had a good grand total of over 10 bikes stolen in my life there

Stealing bikes is still a crime.

If it's toouxh then basically police worries less about trivial stuff like soft drug use

What is wrong with the UK? They don't have a problem with putting video surveillance like the EU does, are they that incompetent?

Local cops are absolute trash. When my house got broken into 3x, each time I was home, local cops did nothing. My dog protected me and drove off the intruders. People were casing my house, because someone shot and killed my dog in my backyard after the 3rd unsuccessfully break in. Still local police did nothing. I've had good experiences with the state police troopers in my area. I work in a NYS agency and my bike is parked right outside the state capital where there are cameras all the fuck over. When my bike got stolen the NYS police reviewed the footage, found the guy, (who was already out on parole,) and sent him right back to prison because he committed another crime and violated his parole. My bike was never recovered. I was able to file a FOI request to get the perps info, and eventually get a civil judgement against him. It's a mixed bag, but you all should be agitating like hell to get shitty cops and shitty police chiefs removed.

As someone who occasionally has to scrub through hours of security camera footage, these cops need to learn what a binary search is. We had some art get stolen from our gallery, and I had to search through ~5 days of footage to find it. I found it in about 3 minutes with a binary search.

Start by defining your timeline. In my case, it was about 5 days (so roughly 120 hours) over the course of a long weekend. Then divide that time in half, (60 hours) and start at the middle. Is the artwork still there? If so, you know you don’t need to bother scrubbing through the first 60 hours at all. Or if it’s already missing, you know you don’t need to bother searching through the second half. Then divide the remaining half in half again, (30 hours) and do the same. Repeat, each time dividing the potential search by half. With only 10 divisions, (each taking only a few seconds to figure out what the next halfway point is and jump to it in the security camera program), I have already narrowed my search down from 5 days to ~7 minutes. And it only took me a few minutes total. And at that point, I just scrub through manually until I find the culprit.

My boss was just sitting at her computer, watching the video at like 2x speed from hour 0, hoping to eventually catch the person. After like 20 minutes of that she gave up and passed it off to me. And I had the incident found in like 3 or 4 minutes total.

The only real reason the cops have to avoid scrubbing through footage is laziness.

I want to say I'm outraged, but outrage required an element of surprise. So I guess I'm just pissed.

Smells like the cops strongarming the public for funding increases. It'd be better for the railway to just hire bike concierge.

Seems like automated video processing could dramatically reduce staff time required to "watch video". Load up the start, draw a box around the bike, then software finds time when bike is removed (or flags smaller number of substantial changes for human review).

But if you abolish the police, who will come help you when your bike is stolen???

The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV footage for these offences, the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains...

Funny they say this, implying they'll be putting a BTP officer or two at every station to keep a lookout. Obviously that's not going to happen.

I'm not sure of the politics around the BTP's funding, but this pullback on responsibilities smells like they are short on officers or money or both.

Fit your bikes with anti theft devices. Landmine under the seat.

"Our experience tells us at an early stage that there are some crimes that are unlikely to ever be solved – such as those without a clear estimate of time or location for the incident or if there is a lack of CCTV or witnesses.

"The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV footage for these offences, the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains, investigating crimes which cause the most harm and providing a visible presence across the network."

Well which is it, a lack of CCTV footage or a lack of time/police resources? They seem to flipping back and forth between these 2 excuses, even when camera evidence is available.

Sorry, lads, the coppers are too busy persecuting people who make critical comments about the government.

Oh hell no. Decriminalize drugs, homelessness, or petty theft from major chain stores with insurance for that crap.

Now, bicycle theft? That strains my dedication to opposing state violence.

So smashing car windows is getting decriminalized too right? RIGHT?

What the fuck. Horse thieves used to get the death penalty.

Optional registration with a bright visible yellow sticker in Belgium https://mybike.belgium.be/

Does it work? Who knows but at least signals to anybody who might want to still your bike that you went the extra mile to prevent theft and you will consequently be annoying enough to signal it at stolen wherever you can. Sure it can be removed somehow (Dremel I guess) but it's extra work that will look very suspicious on a "normal" sale.

FWIW it's also free, you just request the sticker on their Website and receive it by mail few days after.

Plug for bikeindex.org, which I have heard used to actually recover stolen bikes in some cases.

Won't do anything about personal theft, fuck you should have had insurance. Skip out on a 2 quid tram fare though? They're all over that.

This country is ridiculous.

I consider this a companion piece to https://feddit.uk/post/37420973